


Heaven will smell like the airport.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fallen Castiel, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Sandwiches, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-16
Updated: 2013-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-12 01:58:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It wasn’t a throw but a lucky twist and some good leverage, a move like a wrestler or a dancer would make, Cas sliding out of Dean’s grasp and turning the momentum into a slamming blow that actually knocked two legs off the table and Dean straight onto his ass. Dean lies there for a second, contemplating the ceiling, until an open file folder slides down on top of his face, and then he contemplates how good people’s handwriting used to be in the Old Days. </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>*MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON FINALE, 8x23*</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven will smell like the airport.

He can still fight. They discover this the hard way, when he puts Dean through a table in the back room, scattering file boxes everywhere and sending up snowflake flurries of paper, old notes and photocopies, pieces of the card catalogue. It wasn’t a throw but a lucky twist and some good leverage, a move like a wrestler or a dancer would make, Cas sliding out of Dean’s grasp and turning the momentum into a slamming blow that actually knocked two legs off the table and Dean straight onto his ass. Dean lies there for a second, contemplating the ceiling, until an open file folder slides down on top of his face, and then he contemplates how good people’s handwriting used to be in the Old Days. Just, like, _really classy_ , he thinks. Even if the stuff they were writing down was a bunch of cattle mutilation reports and autopsy findings and spells to banish demons.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he says, after a breath or two, when his lungs stop complaining. “See? I told you.” He brushes the file folder off his eyes and sways to his feet, slipping a little in the piles of paper still settling. “Cas?” he says. But he’s alone in the room. Dean scowls. Par for the fucking course. There is no actual disappearing anymore, but that doesn’t mean the exits can’t still be unsettling and too abrupt. Plus, he wears quiet shoes. “Cas?” says Dean again, to the silence. “Come on, man. I was just proving a point,” he calls out. Sam’s head appears in the doorway, peevish and constipated-looking and floating seven feet in the air.

“What the hell was all that?”

“Nothing,” says Dean. His feet scuff in the mess. “Proving a point,” he repeats, sullenly. He bends down and starts to clean up, gathering whole handfuls of paper and shoving them carelessly back into their boxes. Sam sighs. “You gonna help, or you just gonna stand there like an giant-“

“Dean,” says Sam.

“ _Sa-am_ ,” says Dean, in what he guesses is the world’s most infuriating sing-song voice. It’s top ten at least, because Sam stomps away muttering and then comes back with a couple of extra bins and a tool box. Dean helps him turn the table over and prop the broken legs straight and then stands there criticizing his hammer technique until Sam stands up and says, _I will beat you with this_ , and by then it’s lunchtime anyway. Dean retreats to the kitchen and loses half an hour or so puttering around and making three sandwiches—one ham and cheese for him, one turkey and arugula and Dijon mustard for Samantha, and one everything piled on everything for the human garbage disposal that just flipped him like a pancake. He puts them on three plates and actually brings them out into the library, and after a while Sam drifts in, sweaty and still frowning at him. Sam sits and eats with Dean, and then wanders away into the stacks, talking vaguely about rugaru and something something Garth something something Nebraska. The third sandwich sits untouched. Dean stares at it for a long time, before picking it up and carrying it down the hall to Cas’s room, muttering the whole time about his bruised-up back and bad manners and it being fucking lunchtime for fuck’s sake. He knocks on the door and then swings it open, but there’s nobody there. He looks in the other bedrooms and the creepy bunk-bed dormitory, and then in the bathrooms, and takes a lap of the communications room and the laundry room and the range and the armory and a bunch of other rooms they haven’t paid much attention to yet. There is a brief spike of irrational fear when he circles back around to the library and there is still nobody but Sam there, just Sam bent over books and looking dusty and content, no Cas anywhere, the whole bunker empty and hollow and echoing his own footsteps back at him, one by one, like a sad and repetitive joke.

At last he finds Cas, in the dungeon of all places. He has propped open one of the hidden doors with a filing cabinet. Dean stands in the crack of the doorway and looks at him. Cas is sitting against the wall with his knees drawn up and his arms flat and limp at his sides, fingers open and palms exposed, like he’s not sure exactly what his hands should be doing, or why they’re attached to him at all in the first place. He looks up at Dean with a murderous expression, like Dean was the one who flipped _him_ over a table this morning, and he’s still mad about it. It sends a hot spike of pure angry along Dean’s back. If he had hackles to raise, they’d be up.

“Go away,” says the man on the floor. Like Dean is the weird one for intruding on this totally normal dungeon sulking. Dean resists the urge to fling the plate and sandwich at him, just barely. He imagines the lettuce and tomato hitting Cas right in the face, and feels slightly better.

“Lunch,” says Dean. He holds the plate out. “Ham, turkey, tuna and onions, for the growing mutant with no taste buds. It’s getting warm.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“So fucking what,” Dean says, reasonably. Cas looks like he’s been slapped, and then like he’s about to dole out some slapping of his own.

“I didn’t ask for a sandwich,” he hisses. “I didn’t ask for anything.”

“Too bad,” says Dean. “You’re human,” he continues, ignoring the look that earns him. “I told you, you have to eat. Them’s the breaks.” He walks forward and bends down to set the plate on the floor, then sits down cross-legged next to Cas, alongside him, not touching, but close enough that he could. Cas stares at him the whole time, passively, but wary in the whites of his eyes like an animal. Dean wonders if he’d rather flee, or bite. And he wonders, also, suddenly, what new impulses are simmering away with a fresh human nervous system rattling around in there. He wonders if Cas got all the human programming, too, or just the human plumbing, the human needs, without any of the buried instincts. The useful shit, the stuff that tells you how you operate, the basics. Maybe not. Raw deal, falling. So he sits very still, and tries to hold Cas’s eyes with his own. It’s not hard. It’s actually pretty normal. “You have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to drink eight glasses of water a day,” he says, calmly. “You have to take a shower and brush your teeth, actually brush your teeth. You don’t think I know when you just run it under the tap?” Cas looks away and Dean cracks a smile, and maybe Cas can feel it, because he turns his head back, slowly. Curiously. “And then you have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow. That’s the deal.”

“I didn’t make a deal.”

“Yeah, you did.” Dean leans forward. His knee is almost touching Cas’s thigh. He can kind of feel the heat from his legs, the warmth he gives off, this solid body with no angel inside it, just Cas, everything that’s left. The most important parts, the most real. Whatever he was, he still is, as far as Dean’s concerned. Someday he’ll figure out how to say that out loud, but today, this seems more pressing. “You came here, you wanted to stay, and we said yes. So this is the deal. You take care of yourself. You let us take care of you. You stay alive. Same deal I have with Sam,” he says. “Same deal Sam’s got with me.”

Cas exhales, slow and shaky.

“I don’t understand,” he says, finally, “why you wanted to make me angry. Earlier.” He frowns, but it’s not furious, just thoughtful. Working the problems out, unknotting them. Unpacking all the human bullshit, Dean figures. Well, _a lifetime to master_ , he thinks. If ever. “You said a lot of stupid things. You tried to get me upset, and I’m ashamed that it worked so easily. You wanted me to hurt you.”

“No,” says Dean. “I just wanted you to fight back.”

“You could have said so,” Cas tells him. He’s looking at Dean like he knows Dean was dropped on his head a lot as a child, but that he’s not holding it against him. It ought to piss him off, but it doesn’t. It floods Dean with warmth and sunshine and fuzz and other beautiful, embarrassing shit. Dean wonders if he might not be right about the head-dropping thing. He looks down and clears his throat and when he recovers, Cas is actually smiling. It’s thin and crooked and halfway to disappearing again, but Dean will take it. It’s right there, and it’s good, and it’s his.

“Yeah, well,” says Dean. “I suck. Eat your gross sandwich.”

Cas gives him half.

**Author's Note:**

> " _I do my best, but I'm made of mistakes._  
>  Yes, there are things I'm still quite sure of:  
> I love you this hour, this hour today  
> and heaven will smell like the airport.  
> But I may never get there to prove it,  
> so let's not waste our time, thinking how that ain't fair.  
> I'm an animal; you're an animal, too."  
> -Neko Case


End file.
